A typical contact center algorithmically assigns contacts arriving at the contact center to agents available to handle those contacts. At times, the contact center may have agents available and waiting for assignment to inbound or outbound contacts (e.g., telephone calls, Internet chat sessions, email). At other times, the contact center may have contacts waiting in one or more queues for an agent to become available for assignment.
In some typical contact centers, contacts are assigned to agents ordered based on time of arrival, and agents receive contacts ordered based on the time when those agents became available. This strategy may be referred to as a “first-in, first-out”, “FIFO”, or “round-robin” strategy. In some contact centers, contacts or agents are assigned into different “skill groups” or “queues” prior to applying a FIFO assignment strategy within each such skill group or queue. These “skill queues” may also incorporate strategies for prioritizing individual contacts or agents within a baseline FIFO ordering. For example, a high-priority contact may be given a queue position ahead of other contacts who arrived at an earlier time, or a high-performing agent may be ordered ahead of other agents who have been waiting longer for their next call. Regardless of such variations in forming one or more queues of callers or one or more orderings of available agents, contact centers typically apply FIFO to the queues or other orderings. Once such a FIFO strategy has been established, assignment of contacts to agents is automatic, with the contact center assigning the first contact in the ordering to the next available agent, or assigning the first agent in the ordering to the next arriving contact. In the contact center industry, the process of contact and agent distribution among skill queues, prioritization and ordering within skill queues, and subsequent FIFO assignment of contacts to agents is typically managed by a system referred to as an “Automatic Call Distributor” (“ACD”).
Some contact centers may use a “performance based routing” or “PBR” approach to ordering the queue of available agents or, occasionally, contacts. For example, when a contact arrives at a contact center with a plurality of available agents, the ordering of agents available for assignment to that contact would be headed by the highest-performing available agent (e.g., the available agent with the highest sales conversion rate, the highest customer satisfaction scores, the shortest average handle time, the highest performing agent for the particular contact profile, the highest customer retention rate, the lowest customer retention cost, the highest rate of first-call resolution). PBR ordering strategies attempt to maximize the expected outcome of each contact-agent interaction but do so typically without regard for utilizing agents in a contact center uniformly. Consequently, higher-performing agents may receive noticeably more contacts and feel overworked, while lower-performing agents may receive fewer contacts and idle longer, potentially reducing their opportunities for training and improvement as well as potentially reducing their compensation.
In view of the foregoing, it may be understood that there is a need for a system that both attempts to balance the utilization of agents while improving contact center performance beyond what FIFO strategies deliver.